This Day in Civil War History

February 17, 1865 – Columbia, South Carolina became engulfed in flames as Union troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied the capital of the first Southern state to secede from the Union.

During the same 24 hours, the Confederate flag was lowered on Fort Sumter for the last time, as Charleston, which regarded itself as the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” awaited its fate. General P.G.T. Beauregard, a commander with strong engineering and logistical instincts if an overly high regard for his offensive capabilities, had created defenses for fort and city that held out against Federal forces possessing not just superior manpower but also an ironclad fleet. But after 22 months, the Union was lifting the siege.

Charleston fully expected to meet the fate of everything along the way of Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah--absolute destruction. The Northern general now had the means to guarantee the South that it would finally meet the desolate fate he had warned his Confederate-leaning military friends about in the months leading up to the war.

Yet amazingly, Charleston was to escape relatively unscathed when it was occupied by Federal troops on the 18th. What happened?

Some people, with a bent for the romantic, believe that Charleston was spared Sherman’s rage because of tender feelings he still felt for a woman while a young soldier at nearby Fort Moultrie. Take a look at any picture of this hard-eyed modern man of war, though. Does this strike you as very likely? I didn’t think so.

More likely, what happened, as hard to believe as it was to Charlestonians, was that the city was just not as important to the defense of the South as Columbia. Not only a major munitions center, the state capital also possessed major stores of food.

Moreover, Charleston’s location in the Low Country made it a mess for marching. “We must all turn amphibious,” Sherman wrote, for the country is half under weather.”

Nothing could distract him from his first priority—Richmond, where he would join forces with boss and friend General Ulysses S. Grant, and preventing Robert E. from slipping away to the West and conducting a guerrilla war. That meant Sherman turned inland, toward Columbia.

By that night, while lying down to rest in a home he was occupying, Sherman “became conscious that a bright light was shining on the walls,” he later wrote in his memoirs. The high wind he had noticed in the morning was spreading burning cotton.

Responsibility for what happened next has been debated ever since. Before long, Columbia met the fate of Atlanta: utter ruination by fire.

A bitter South castigated Sherman for the conflagration, while he claimed neither motive nor responsibility for the act—though he did not help his credibility by admitting in his memoirs that his official report blamed Confederate General Wade Hampton, “for he was in my opinion boastful, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”

Southerners sought any possibility means to avoid the wrath of the now-infamous Northern general, with one of the more unusual—and, probably, mistaken—avenues being an appeal to his religion—or what they thought was his religion.

At the death of his father, when he was nine years old, Sherman had been adopted by a prominent, politically connected lawyer, Thomas Ewing, who had converted to Roman Catholicism at the behest of his wife. The Ewings, having raised all their own children in their faith, also had their foster son baptized in the faith.

Since the baptism took place on the feast day of St. William of Montevergine, the boy was given the first name of William. However, Sherman’s deceased parents had been nominally Episcopalian. In adult life he not only was not a churchgoer in any faith but would not answer to his given first name, preferring instead the nickname “Cump,” a shortened version of “Tecumseh.”

Differences over religion, however, did not prevent Sherman from marrying the Ewings’ daughter, Eleanor. The general permitted their children to be raised Catholic, and in later years one son, much to his father’s annoyance, became a Catholic priest.

Somehow all of this tangled family history became submerged, and all that people in the Protestant-dominated South could seem to recall was that he had some association and perhaps sympathy with Catholicism. A southern-born co-worker related to me, not too long ago that, according to legend, an Episcopalian church in her home city (Savannah, I believe), to forestall any chance of pillage at the hands of Sherman, put up a sign reading, “Roman Catholic.”

Sherman’s memoir related a more direct and truthful entreaty. On the morning of his entry into Columbia, while sitting on a log watching his engineers complete a pontoon bridge, he received a penciled note from the head of an Ursuline convent in Columbia. She “claimed to have been a teacher in a convent in Brown County, Ohio, at the time my daughter Minnie was a pupil there, and asking my special protection.”

I can just picture the scene—the general sitting there, in a hurry to get his men across that bridge and stop Lee and this infernal war—and now this. Sherman’s reaction? He passed the note along to brother-in-law Charles, an inspector-general on his staff, with orders to see the nun and let her know personally “that we contemplated no destruction of any private property in Columbia at all.”

Two cities and two different fates at the hands of one conqueror. Quite a day.